Tuesday, 11 December 2007

Stone Discovers New Johnny Cash, Recruits Him For Project

This summer, musician Emmanuel "Vinny" Miranda had an angry conversation with a girl that ended with him hanging up the phone. "I was like, 'Well, forget this,'" says Miranda, a 10th-grader at Todd Beamer High School. Pissed, he grabbed a pencil and wrote some lyrics about how the girl was "all alone/With nobody in your life to call your own."

That's where the story would've ended for most jilted teenagers. But most jilted teenagers aren't "Juanny Cash, the 15-Year-Old Johnny Cash Prodigy," as Miranda is billed at his weekly gig at downtown's Can Can nightclub. As it turns out, he recently had a recording session with John Carter Cash, son of Johnny. His lyrics are now immortalized on a yet-to-be released CD with Dave Roe, bass-slapper for the Tennessee Three, and Jamie Hartford, who played electric guitar for the 2005 Cash biopic, Walk the Line.

"With that voice, you think, 'Well that's just the greatest thing I've ever heard,'" says Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam. In September, Gossard pulled Miranda into his studio for an "ongoing project" that has Seattle musicians reinterpreting the songs of Hank Williams Sr. "He has this incredible gift, this huge sound. And then he's got a real fire in his eye, and he gives it up."